We are eager to hear your opinions on all matters of public sociology, so feel free to peruse the course materials listed below, then participate in the active Facebook forum. All this from the leisure of your own home!

Here is the last formal video from Laleh and me — our preliminary summary of the course, what we drew from the amazing discussions. But it cannot stop here. Many of you are still catching up and so posts will continue. But I’m hoping you and others will create your own videos on public sociology, post them here and generate further discussion and debate. If public sociology is to move forward we must learn from each other in different places on the planet. Onward and upward!

Biography

Distinguished Professor Frances Fox Piven received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Before coming to the Graduate Center, she taught at Boston University, Columbia University, New York University Law School, the Institute of Advanced Studies in Vienna, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Bologna. She is past Vice-President of the American Political Science Association, has served as program co-chair of the annual political science meetings, and is a past president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. She is currently President of the American Sociological Association. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the President’s Award of the American Public Health Association, and the American Sociological Association’s Career Award for the Practice of Sociology, as well as their award for the Public Understanding of Sociology. Her books deal with the development of the welfare state, political movements, urban political, and electoral politics. Among them are Regulating the Poor (winner of the C. Wright Mills Award ub 1972, and updated in 1993); Poor People’s Movements (1977); The New Class War (1982; updated 1985); Why Americans Don’t Vote (1988); The Mean Season (1987); LAbor Parties in Posindustrial Societies(1992); The Breaking of the American Social Contract (1997); Why Americans Still Don’t Vote (2000); and The War At Home (2004); Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America (2006).

Piven & UC Berkeley

Biography

Pun Ngai received a PhD from the School of Oriental and African studies at the University of London in 1998. She is currently an associate professor in the social science department at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology with interests in Labor and gender; globalization; Mainland China and Hong Kong.

Dr. Pun Ngai was honored as the winner of the C. Wright Mills Award at an awards banquet on 11 August 2006 in Montreal Canada. Dr. Pun Ngai’s award-winning book for 2005 is titled “Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace.” Her honor was all the more precious as she became the first Asian winner of this prestigious award since its establishment in 1964.

Biography

Michel Wieviorka (born 23 August 1946, Paris) is a French sociologist, noted for his work on violence, terrorism, racism, social movements and the theory of social change.

A former student of Alain Touraine, he is now one of the most renowned sociologists and public intellectuals in France and abroad. A number of his books are translated in different languages. Wieviorka received some international media attention as an expert following the 2005 civil unrest in France, and has been elected in Durban as the 2006-2010 President of the International Sociological Association.

Together with Touraine and François Dubet, Wieviorka developed the method of intervention sociologique and employed it to the study of militant social movements, in particular French anti-nuclear activism and student leagues, but also the famous trade unions Solidarnosc in Poland. Following Max Weber’s classic concept of interpretative sociology (verstehende Soziologie), intervention sociologique aims at understanding the subjective rationale of actors in the context of larger social conflicts. This concept was opposed to, e.g., Raymond Boudon’s failed attempt to establish a strict rational choice approach in French sociology.

Wieviorka is the director of the Centre d’Analyses et d’Interventions Sociologique (CADIS) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, which was established by Alain Touraine in 1981.

Wieviorka is the founder and editor of the sociological journal Le Monde des Debats and, with Georges Balandier, edits the Cahiers internationaux de sociologie.

In 1989, he was the first scholar to receive the Bulzoni Editore Special Award of the European Amalfi Prize for Sociology and Social Sciences, for his book Société et terrorisme (1988, English edition The Making of Terrorism 1993).

Biography

Full Professor of Sociology at the American University of Beirut and editor of Idafat: the Arab Journal of Sociology (Arabic). He is also a member of the Executive Bureau of the Arab Association of Sociology. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (1994). He has served as a visiting professor at the University of Poitiers and Migrintern (France), University of Bologna and Ravenna (Italy) and visiting fellow in CMI (Bergen, Norway).

Hanafi was also the former Director of the Palestinian Refugee and Diaspora Centre (Shaml) from 2000-2004 and a former senior research at the Cairo based French research center, Centre d’études et de documentation économique juridique et sociale from 1994-2000. He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on the political and economic sociology of the Palestinian diaspora and refugees; sociology of migration; transnationalism; politics of scientific research; civil society and elite formation and transitional justice. Among his recent books are: The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in The Occupied Palestinian Territories, edited with A. Ophir & M. Givoni, 2009, NewYork: Zone Book; The Emergence of a Palestinian Globalized Elite: Donors, International Organizations and Local NGOs, edited with L. Taber, 2005; and Pouvoir et associations dans le monde arabe, edited with S. Bennéfissa, 2002, Paris: CNRS. In addition to his academic work, he has served as a consultant to the UN, the World Bank, and other organizations.

Biography

Associate Prof Karl von Holdt is Director of the Society Work and
Development Institute at Wits University. He has been involved with the
trade union movement for over two decades, most notably as editor of the
South African Labour Bulletin and as co-ordinator of COSATU’s September
Commission on the Future of the Unions, and as a senior researcher at
COSATU’s policy Institute, NALEDI.

Karl von Holdt was a member of the Board of the SA Post Office (1997-2003)
and has worked on hospital transformation at Chris Hani Baragwanath
Hospital. He is the author of Transition from Below: Forging Trade
Unionism and Workplace Change in South Africa (UKZN Press, 2003),
co-author of Conversations with Bourdieu: The Johannesburg Moment (with
Michael Burawoy, forthcoming) and co-edited (with Eddie Webster) Beyond
the apartheid workplace: studies in transition (UKZN Press 2005). Current
research focuses include social cohesion, social fragmentation, health
systems, collective violence, and the state.

Biography

Walden Bello, born in Manila, Philippines, is a member of the Philippine House of Representatives for Akbayan Party-List, president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition, a senior analyst at Focus on the Global South, and a fellow of the Transnational Institute. He is the author of 15 books on globalization, militarization, and other related issues. He is both an academic and an activist. Bello obtained his PhD in sociology from Princeton University in the US in 1975 and served as a full professor at the University of the Philippines at Diliman from 1997 to 2009. He is currently also adjunct professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton and St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada, a member of the board of editors of the Review of International Political Economy, and a fellow of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. He has also served as visiting professor at the University of California at Los Angeles (2002), UC Irvine and UC Santa Barbara (2006). He taught for four years, 1978-82, at UC Berkeley. He was Chancellor’s Fellow at UC Irvine in 2004 and was awarded an honorary PhD by Panteion University in Athens, Greece, in 2005. He was recently named Outstanding Public Scholar by the International Political Economy Section of the International Studies Association (ISA) during its 49th annual convention in San Francisco in February 2008. As an activist against dictatorship, Bello was arrested for civil disobedience several times in the United States and spent time in jail in San Francisco. He was one of the leaders of an Asian Parliamentary and Civil Society Mission that went to Iraq in March 2003 in a last-ditch effort to forestall the US invasion of that country. In August 2006, he was also one of the leaders of an Asian peace delegation to Beirut, Lebanon, at the height of the Israeli bombardment of that city. Bello currently sits on the board of directors of the International Forum on Globalization.